"To Alex Colville: A Correspondence"

Lincoln Kirstein sends a letter to a young, little-known Canadian artist after having bought Three Sheep from the Hewitt Gallery, New York, in 1955

John Barton

John Barton’s twenty-eight books, chapbooks, and anthologies include Emily Carr: A Self Portrait; For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems; Polari; Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets; We Are Not Avatars: Essays, Memoirs, Manifestos; and The Essential Douglas LePan. In 2020, he published Lost Family with Signal Editions and The Essential Derk Wynand with Porcupine’s Quill. Born in Edmonton and raised in Calgary, he lives in Victoria, BC, where he is the city’s first queer poet laureate.

“‘To Alex Colville: A Correspondence’ is a letter (written in modified heroic couplets) from Lincoln Kirstein, the New York-based public intellectual who purchased Three Sheep (1954) early in the Colville’s career. Kirstein writes to shed light on why he bought it while contrasting the virtues of the artist’s rural life, as evinced by the painting, with his own busy Manhattan life as a ballet impresario. (With George Balanchine, Kirstein cofounded the New York City Ballet.) I chose an epistolary form because the idea of ‘correspondence’ captures the relationship between artist and viewer—and sometimes the viewer wants to speak back to the artist to share his experience of sustained looking. Kirstein donated Three Sheep to the National Gallery of Canada.”

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To live remote, you stay well-deep beyond
The meniscus of power, not longing
For nerve to hew more urbane perspectives

Instead of fences, dikes against restive

Tides the seasons drumbeat in, the ocean
Weathering protractor-curved roads you know
Better than the cupped pool of your wife’s hand

Depths you surface from, mirror in shades layered

To lack shadow not breadth, fields of clover
Grazing sheep nose through until they hover
Clouds in meadows of likely erasure

Zephyrs nibbling alongside, their languor
Black-faced and placid, snouts hard as the sheep’s own

Or our own, though we’re more skittish, at home
With marked ambitions in Gramercy Park
Dance espaliered against the garden’s

Wrought-iron gates before it’s sketched on stage
The poise of every ascending pose made

On limbs and torsos until the costumes
Are pinned and slimmed, the tiers of expense assumed
To elevate before the flies are built

On prayers, anxious gestures struck and held
As, breathlessly, the curtains lift or fall

Far from where you work, one more sheep installed

Foraging near two flock mates sprawled in grass
Piqued ears twitching, engaged and curious
The marshes’ tangle of channels frantic

With migrant birds urged by the Atlantic
To rise and fly through the woolly time-lapse

Of your painting’s fourth wall, the ewes relaxed
Glancing with flat chestnut eyes at the ram
Nothing he sees dogging them past the hem

Of browsed grandeur penning them in, their dance

Of movement and anchored stasis a balanced
Footing for aesthetics, the magic real.

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